Tuesday, January 31, 2012

The metasearch engine. My students couldn't even tell you what that means. Google is their only friend when it comes to searching. But what if someone wants to pool their results from more than one search engine? Perhaps Yahoo, AskJeeves or Bing? That's where these 15 metasearch engines come in. Perhaps my students will give them a try........

Brain Boost- this is an answer engine rather than a search engine. What that means is that "Brainboost actually finds answers to your questions posed in plain English as opposed to directing you to pages that simply mention the questions.”

KartOO- KartOO is a metasearch engine with visual display interfaces. When you click on OK, KartOO launches the query to a set of search engines, gathers the results, compiles them and represents them in a series of interactive maps through a proprietary algorithm.

Sunday, January 29, 2012

Ever since bookstores have been selling books, they have shelved them by subject area. When patrons go to any subject section, they can usually find the book they are looking for by the last name of the author. This includes fiction and nonfiction books. Those of us who were taught to use the Dewey Decimal System are used to using decimals for the ten nonfiction sections from 000-999. When a student asks me to find a particular book, all I need is the call number to get to the exact location of that book. How would the bookstore model do in a school library? Some elementary school librarians like the idea because nonfiction books could be easier for young kids to locate. Judge for yourself.